2004 Vacation Highlights

I'm back from vacation and I accomplished much of what I had hoped. I took 3 fiction/recreational reads (Cryptonomicon, Pattern Recognition, Art of Deception) along, but didn't touch them. I studied my design patterns books and wrote some great blog code (which I've just deployed).

Here are some highlights of my past week:

• Went to the beach 3 times to play with Paige a bit. She loved the beach and spent lots of time there with Claire.
• One day I constructed and consumed 2 10-inch sandwiches in one lunch. While it subdued my hunger, it didn't stuff me, so I bet I could have actually eaten a third sandwich!
• Sean taught me how to make excellent fried rice. We had seafood and chicken fried rice.
• I won at Scrabble.
• I ran up a hell of a GPRS data bill.
• I learned to hate AT&T Wireless' customer dis-service for putting me on 1hr hold at 9:30pm on a weekday.
• I made my blog code a bit easier to extend and maintain through a few well-placed patterns.
• My Timex Helix WRKS altimiter doesn't like to slip into negative altitudes which can happen when the weather changes near sea level. I found that calibrating the simple altimeter 1000ft high solved the problem of it just reading 'LO' and not being able to be recalibrated. Air pressure seems to be linearly related to altitude as I had expected, so the real altitude can still be determined easily.
• Sean taught me how to play Prince of Persia on the GameCube.
• I actually sat down and played single-player video games (Prince of Persia and Double Dash) while everyone else had wandered off to the beach.